Shmuel Trigano

Shmuel Trigano is Paris University Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Religion and Politics. He was Senior Fellow for 2012-2013 at the Herzl Institute where he wrote Hebrew, a Philosophy. Toward a New Jewish Thought (French, 2014). He has published 24 books in the fields of Jewish (Political) Philosophy, Jewish Identity, Jewish Modernity, Contemporary Judaism, French Jewry, Sociology of Religion and Politics, and more. He has edited numerous collective books in the domains of Jewish History, Jewish Thought, Jewish Memory. Among his publications, The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah:The Unconscious in Political Modernity was published in English by SUNY Press in 2009 and in Hebrew by Ben Gurion University Press in 2010. His most recent English-language publication, Philosophy of the Law, was published by Shalem Press in 2012. One of Trigano’s recent works, Judaism and the Spirit of the World (French, 2011), proposes a global theory of Judaism as a living and symbolical system. His latest book is titled: The New Jewish State (French, 2015). Trigano was the founding Director of the College of Jewish Studies (1986-2013) at the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris. He founded in 2013 in Paris the Popular University for Judaism (http://www.unipopu.org). He is also Founding Director of Pardès, a European Journal of Jewish Studies and Culture (www.inpress.fr) (1985-) and of Controverses (http://www.controverses.fr ), a journal of political ideas (2006-2011). In 2001, he created a research center devoted to the analysis of contemporary antisemitism. He is president of the Observatoire du monde juif (http://obs.monde.juif.free.fr).

His current research project at the Herzl Institute is titled The Angelic Moment in Monotheism: Theory and Historical Development of a Figure.